Stanford Humanities Center
Mark McGurl's scholarly work centers on the relation of literature to social, educational and other institutions from the late 19th century to the present. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), which was the recipient of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for 2011.
McGurl’s previous book was The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton). He has also published articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. He teaches a range of classes on American literature and related topics.
McGurl received his BA from Harvard, then worked at the New York Times and the New York Review of Books before earning his PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins. He has held fellowships from Office of the President of the University of California and the Stanford Humanities Center.
SHC Project
Who Will Word Magic: Epic Fantasy in Our Time
McGurl will be working on a study of the genre of epic fantasy from precursors to Tolkien to the present. He will be asking what the genre shows us about the attraction to anti-democratic governance (games of thrones) in putatively democratic modernity; what the philological origins of the genre tell us about the fate of nationalist and post-nationalist conceptions of language and literary history; and finally what we see when we look into the dark mirror the genre holds up to the modern (formerly medieval) university.
